The dominant historical strand of the anarchist movement, distinguished from its individualist and market-oriented cousins by its rejection of private property as well as the state. Founded in the 19th century through Mikhail Bakunin's collectivism and Peter Kropotkin's anarcho-communism — Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid are its central texts — it holds that a free society would organise through voluntary associations and federations rather than through either markets or a centralised state. It includes anarcho-communism, collectivist anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalism, and counts Emma Goldman among its best-known figures. Social anarchism opposes capitalism and Marxist state-socialism in equal measure, insisting that the means of emancipation must already embody the freedom they aim at.
Tradition
Social Anarchism
The anti-capitalist, anti-statist tradition that seeks to abolish both the state and private property in favour of voluntary cooperation, common ownership, and federated self-government.
Thinkers
Thinker
Peter Kropotkin
1842–1921
Peter Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist communist whose Mutual Aid and The Conquest of Bread built the most systematic positive case for a cooperative society organized without the state
ThinkerEmma Goldman
1869–1940
Emma Goldman was a Russian-American anarchist whose fearless advocacy of labor rights, free speech, and birth control made her the most visible radical in early twentieth-century America
Related through shared thinkers